. >> panetta leaving office with an extraordinary acknowledgement that the defense department, the cia, state department, all of them recommended to the president that the u.s. should start arming, directly arming syrian rebels but the president decided that was not necessarily a good idea. that's pretty extraordinary. >> it was extraordinary. he was asked about it at a congressional hearing. what is interesting to me is someone who covers washington, it's not that there is disagreement at certain points over policy between the secretary of defense and the secretary of state and the president of the united states. what's amazing, wolf, is that we never knew about it before. so when you saw the president assisting hillary clinton in her good-bye tour and you saw a president who really was thanking her for not leaking. and what we also see in this is that foreign policy is really run from the white house and not from anywhere else. this is a very white house centric national security team and i think that the president is, of course, first among equals. if you look at those people up on